Zeng Guofan was one of the most influential figures in Chinese history. Zeng Guofan raised the Xiang Army to fight effectively against the Taiping Rebellion of the Qing Dynasty. He was the first scholar to be awarded a military title. He later held various high-ranking official positions, including those of governor and viceroy.
Background
Zeng Guofan was born into a rich landlord's family with nine siblings. He was the eldest son in the family. His ancestors lived a wealthy life as farmers. He was intelligent and hardworking. He was known for his strategic perception, administrative skill and noble personality on Confucian practice, but also sometimes for his ruthlessness on the execution of his policies.
Education
Zeng Guofan passed the highest level civil service examinations in 1838 and was awarded the degree of jinshi. He was subsequently inducted into the Hanlin Academy, the leading academic institution of imperial China. His career as an imperial and provincial official was shaped by his study of Confucian texts in preparation for the examinations. He exemplified the practicality of the neo-Confucian School of Statecraft, the moral rectitude of the orthodox Song School, and the rigorous literary style of the Tongzheng School. Zeng defended traditional civilization through innovations and introduction of military and economic features of Western civilization.
Career
In 1853, at the behest of the imperial government, Zeng organized local defense forces in his home province Hunan into a provincial militia, known as the Hunan army. Locally financed and led by carefully selected Confucian gentry, the Hunan army was well-disciplined and highly effective, turning back the Western expeditionary force of the Taiping army in Hunan in 1854. During 1855-1856, the Hunan army encountered stiff resistance and suffered serious losses in naval and land battles with the Taipings in the central Yangzi valley. Zeng was surrounded by enemy forces in Jiangxi during much of this time. Shortly after reinforcements reached him in 1856, the Taiping leadership was crippled by a murderous power struggle affording Zeng the opportunity, once again, to take the offensive.
After returning to Hunan to mourn the death of his father, Zeng resumed command of the Hunan army in 1857 and began preparations to retake the Taiping stronghold at Anjing, a strategic Yangzi River port and capital of Anhui province. By the summer of 1859, the Hunan army had expelled the last Taipings from Jiangxi and Zeng moved his command post to Wuchang from where he would launch an attack on Anjing.
In 1860, preparing to strike at Anjing he relocated his headquarters at Qimen in southern Anhui. There he was bottled up by Taiping defenders of Anjing until 1861. Meanwhile, in 1860 the imperial forces attempting to retake the Taiping capital at Nanjing were dealt a crushing defeat by a Taiping army revitalized under new leadership. Desperate, the imperial court sought a new strategic plan and a new commander. On June 8, 1860, Zeng was named governor general of the Liangjiang provinces (Jiangxi, Jiangsu, and Anhui) and imperial commissioner for suppression of the Taipings with wide-ranging administrative, financial, and military authority.
In the summer of 1861, rebel forces were diverted from Qimen by Hunan army units led by Zuo Zongtang. Zeng broke through the Taiping investment, and resumed operations against the rebels in southern Anhui. On September 5, 1861 units of the Hunan army commanded by Zeng’s brother Zeng Guoquan succeeded in recapturing Anjing. From there, the Hunan army began a drive to clear resistance from southern Anhui in preparation for an assault on the Taiping capital at Nanjing. Supported by the Empress Dowager Cixi who had seized power at court during the winter of 1861 and by Prince Gong, Zeng was also given control of military operations in Zhejiang.
In the east however, in August 1860, a revitalized Taiping army reached the suburbs of Shanghai where they were repulsed by British- and French- led forces protecting the foreign interests in that port city. The following year, Chinese merchants in Shanghai appealed to Zeng for defense reinforcements. Fearing the further growth of foreign-led military forces in the beleaguered city, Zeng responded to this request ordering one of his staff, Li Hongzhang to raise an army in Li’s native province Anhui. In April 1862, Li's Anhui army was transported down the Yangzi to Shanghai in steamships rented from foreign firms. Li was named governor of Jiangsu province. By the end of 1862, the Anhui army operating in concert with foreign-led forces succeeded in driving the Taipings from the region surrounding Shanghai. Meanwhile, Zeng had arranged for Zuo Zongtang to direct military operations against the Taipings in Zhejiang. By April 1864, Zuo had cleared that province and retaken the capital at Hangzhou. Concurrently, forces led by Zeng Guoquan advancing from Anjing met determined resistance in the suburbs of Nanjing but finally entered the city in July 1864.
Though scattered resistance persisted until 1866, the fall of Nanjing marked the end of the real threat that the Taipings posed to the Manchu dynasty. Zeng, the architect of the victory, was named a marquis of the first class. In a demonstration of his loyalty to the throne, he demobilized more than 120,000 troops of the Hunan army. Zeng had assumed his peace-time duties in Nanjing as governor general of the Liangjiang provinces only briefly when the court called upon him in June 1865 to lead the campaign against the Nian rebellion in north China. Zeng's strategy of strengthening village defenses brought little success. In early 1866, he recommended that Li Hongzhang take command of the struggle against the Nian and Zeng, in failing health, returned to Nanjing from where he kept Li's Anhui army supplied with modern arms and ammunition.
The recognition of the efficacy of Western ordnance and steamships and an ill-fated attempt to rent British steamships in 1863 persuaded Zeng to undertake domestic production. After several attempts, in 1865, he established the giant Jiangnan Arsenal and Shipyard in Shanghai, China's first modern machine industry.
In 1870 while serving as governor general of the metropolitan province of Zhili, Zeng was named to investigate the Tianjin massacre a dispute with France resulting from antiforeign riots in the city of Tianjin. Zeng's conciliatory approach, designed to keep the dynasty from a costly war that he knew it could not win, earned him the disdain oflater Chinese nationalists.
Summoned back to the Liangjiang governor general’s post in 1871,Zeng together with Li Hongzhang launched the Chinese Educational Mission which sent carefully selected Chinese youth to the United States for extended periods of study. Though the educational aims of the mission were frustrated by conservative opposition and international disputes, like the establishment of the Jiangnan Arsenal, the Chinese Educational Mission represented Zeng's willingness to innovate and adapt features of Western civilization in defense of the dynasty.
Zeng died in March 1872 while serving as Liangjiang governor general. His political leadership is unique in nineteenth-century China. He employed the moral rectitude of a Confucian leader to mobilize his many followers in support of a traditional polity that was eventually transformed by the innovations and adaptations he struggled to introduce.
Interests
Zeng was a voluminous writer. His papers addressed to the throne and his literary disquisitions are held in high esteem by Chinese scholars, who treasure as the edition of his collected works in 156 books, which was edited by Li Hongzhang in 1876, as a memorial of a great and incorruptible statesman. Zeng enjoyed reading greatly, and held a special interest in the 23 Histories, and other Chinese classics. He was also a dedicated poet and a diary author.
Zeng called Hakka females "big foot hillbilly witch(es)" during the Taiping Rebellion after his encountering with them.
Connections
Unlike his contemporaries, who had multiple wives or kept concubines, Zeng was officially married only once, to a woman of the Ouyang family when he was in his late teens. His wife was known to be a capable woman. He had three sons and five daughters with her, and two of his eldest children died young. His eldest son, Zeng Jize, who inherited his noble peerage "First Class Marquis Yiyong", went on to become a famous diplomat in the late Qing dynasty.
Zeng's ninth brother, Zeng Guoquan, was an ambitious general in the Xiang Army. He was later appointed Viceroy of Liangjiang in 1884. Zeng's great-granddaughter, Zeng Baosun, was a feminist, historian, and Christian educator.